I am absolutely biased, but there is a lot of attempt to shift or at least share the blame here and not a lot of accountability. Flock themselves mis-translated the plate, plain and simple, and should not be being used in production for alerting authorities on very serious matters.
We are already very aware that the police overreact and make plenty of mistakes. The obvious here being that even if this was the exact plate criminals can very easily, and do, swap plates - so you shouldn't just aggressively be knocking down vehicles because of the standard screwed in license plate that is displayed on the back. When was the last time you checked your license plate and made sure it was still yours? Would you even know it is yours? It has happened to me.
The way I see it their fundamental business model is not something we should tolerate. This is basically just stalking with a lot of money put behind it and barely any legal accountability. This is just not a thing we should tolerate in a free society.
In Pampano beach FL my 76 yo mother got pulled over for driving a stolen vehicle. Luckily the police had some common sense to decipher what happened. Plate swap, same make model and color.
> We are already very aware that the police overreact and make plenty of mistakes
This is the deeper problem. See BLM, and then the backlash against that to create a much less accountable federal paramilitary/carabinieri force, ICE, resulting in the Minnesota conflict and several people getting killed.
And what lies underneath all that? Dirty Harry and a whole stack of subsequent propaganda. There's a very powerful story that the world is full of criminals and any form of police accountability (such as double checking information before acting, or taking a safety focused approach to stops which may include not doing them) is getting in the way of "fighting crime".
HN is firmly against Flock, but there are lots of people, Republicans and Democrats, who are going around demanding more surveillance to fight crime.
(The UK "ring of steel" and high presence of surveillance cameras and ANPR do not seem to have nearly this much level of problems. Here the controversy over stops is mostly good old manual racial discrimination for "driving while black")
The being tough on crime narrative ignores that police can act like criminals, have biases, enforce societal stereotypes and class systems, be incompetent or just make mistakes like any other human. Having a gun and a badge doesn't prevent any of that, thus the need for accountability. But voters also have to hold their representatives accountable for making sure police departments and justice systems do this.
> Flock themselves mis-translated the plate, plain and simple, and should not be being used in production for alerting authorities on very serious matters.
I am anti-Flock to the point that my friends and family roll their eyes when the topic comes up, but saying that because the image recognition software did not achieve 100% accuracy it can't be used under any circumstances is just silly.
I agree Flock shouldn't be used (I'd love to see the company bankrupt, the investors lose their money, and the founders imprisoned), but the accuracy of their software has nothing to do with why.
Weird to us, but it's not as if it's not well known to (in this case) the state of NJ, nor is there an infinite set of license plate designs, particularly for the actual letter/number size, shape, and coloring.
I wish Garrett had been asked about his attitude towards false positives and negatives. He's previously said that he feels false positives are a better option than negatives.
> Flock themselves mis-translated the plate, plain and simple
To be fair to Flock, from what was said in this conversation they were told to be on the lookout of a partial plate of 34DTM. Meaning, there could be some additional characters that were not originally caught. So 34DTM10 and 1034DTM could potentially both be matches. It doesn't seem to me like Flock mistranslated the plate.
> The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.
No, it wasn't looking for partial matches, it was looking for an exact match of "34 DTM" and it missed the "10" in the middle of the victims plate because it was in non-standard small lettering (as required by law for those types of plates in their state).
This isn't in the featured article, thanks for sharing. I see its in one of the linked articles giving more backstory.
This is still an instance of a partial match. If it was looking for an exact match of 34 DTM, it wouldn't have found the target 34 03 DTM. So more like it was searching for /*34*DTM*/ instead of /*34DTM*/
There's a lot more than just Flock, Flock is just one of thousands of terrible companies creating mass spying on innocent people. And there's also other ALPR companies like Axon and Motorola.
Flock may be worse than those because of the AI features and large databases, but other companies making surveillance tech are not avoiding the AI features because of moral reasons.
There is a huge difference between the likes of Flock + Axon/Motorola currently. Flock is bad not because its surveillance its bad due to the scale, size and centralization.
- cop messed up, added an incomplete license plate number (34DTM) into the NCIC database.
- Flock cameras found his fancy car, a $155k Range Rover, which had a license plate like 34DTM10, and flagged it.
- cops didn't bother checking the police report before they went in and surrounded him.
thoughts:
- as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here. this was a scene straight of Brazil, and Flock was the typewriter. it was an accelerant, not the cause.
- police are shockingly incompetent. the individual officers, the departments, the bureaucratic systems, they're bad at their jobs. probably because they're insulated from consequences - these are people who can shoot the wrong person by accident, and at worst they get fired (QI.)
- none of this would have made the news if it wasn't a $155k Range Rover being driven by a reporter. how many people in beat-up Carollas have faced this same situation?
Flock's system misread the plate, simple as that. Trying to pitch it as solely human error just shows that they don't want to take responsibility of the limitations of their software. Handling partial matches should be the bare minimum. In this article the CEO talks like considering those is a great idea that they'll look into. That's so incredibly dumb that I can't believe that they don't already do that. What likely actually happened is that the plate was incorrectly flagged as a perfect match.
Why is their tech not tested on every plate format that is currently used? That should be table stakes. Why did it not flag the match for review because the "34" and "DTM" had an unusual amount of space between them (not matching expected spacing of NJ plates)? The truth is that they are probably just using some free ML models off of hugging face and selling it as a magic black box that finds criminals to police.
> as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here
Seeing this in an engineering-centric community disappoints me. It's hard to say for certain without seeing the system but I think it's extremely likely they are at fault. Things that come to mind:
- If the incomplete plate really was "34DTM" - why does the system allow that to be added? Either you should use actual wildcards to indicate you are searching for a partial or you should be blocked from adding an incomplete plate.
- This likely is not the first time his car was seen by the system. Why did they not require the person entering the partial match to clear / assess all of the cars that were known already?
- Alternatively, if it had never been seen before, why was that info not highlighted?
- If "flagging" the same for partial and full matches - that seems like a substantial design oversight.
There are so many things Flock could have done to prevent this kind of inevitable user error.
> The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.
No, it wasn't looking for partial matches, it was looking for an exact match of "34 DTM" and it missed the "10" in the middle of the victims plate because it was in non-standard small lettering (as required by law for those types of plates in their state). To be clear, the 10 was in the middle of the victims plate number, which was "34 10 DTM", not the end of it.
You misunderstand Brazil--the system is the cause.
People can be relied upon to make mistakes. Any system that does not account for this fact and allows mistakes to "accelerate" is fundamentally flawed and requires redesign.
The system needs to account for how it will be used and resulting externalities. Being an accelerant can be a problem in and of itself. I do agree that having stricter societal and legal guardrails here is probably better then relying on companies to do the right thing, though.
So we should give guns to children then because it’s just a tool to defend themselves right? Or a more common metaphor, if you give chimpanzee’s a gun…
The police have no actionable method of abuse if you take Flock cameras away. They wouldn’t be acting on flagged random license plates if you took away the dragnet and surveillance system that’s randomly flagging people.
Flock can be a terrible unconstitutional company and this particular incident can have nothing to do with that and not be Flock's responsibility in any way. Acting like anyone who understands how true legacy ALPR systems work and how police officers track plates and search for stolen vehicles are by extension somehow supporting or excusing Flock is ridiculous.
Nearly the exact same thing could have happened with traditional non-surveillance ALPR systems, or with manual plate running by officers in cars.
Nope! Traditional ALPR systems follow the law and do not give out access like candy and do not automate flagging and tracking individuals. Traditional systems are not a dragnet.
> But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM.
The license plate is 34 DTM. There is nothing about Flock that caused this to happen - had any officer run this plate while sitting behind the car in traffic, exactly the same thing would have happened.
Is there any evidence or other form of justification for the Flock CEO's claims about how it is responsible for SF's crime downturn? I find it hard to believe that Flock cameras are at the heart of such a wide-ranging effect. I am not a local, and I have only done a cursory search, but I don't see the elected officials making the same claim -- I have seen them say it has more to do with changing socioeconomic factors.
"Inevitably what happens is, let’s take the rental car example: A car is reported stolen by the rental car agency."
I've heard stories of rental car companies being very aggressive in reporting a car stolen. It sounds like Flock is having to do a lot of work to handle reports made by rental car companies specifically. This leaves me wondering how aggressive rental companies are in reporting back to the department they made the stolen report notifying the car had been found. I'm guessing not very.
These rental companies need to be held responsible for their lackadaisical use of stolen car reports. It is not the police's responsibility for what is essentially a contract dispute. If I allow someone to borrow my car, the police will not consider this a stolen car situation even if they said they would bring it back the next day. This is no different than a car not being returned to the rental company, so why are the police willing to be involved?
If Flock has so many issues with this database, and all their solutions are patchwork, and those solutions remain local to the jurisdiction that is locally using Flock, then this is a bad product.
If you build a product on a bad database, you cannot load the blame for the resulting bad product on the bad database. If it was not fit for purpose, then the product designers are the problem as much as anything else.
This applies doubly for a product that relies so heavily on automation enabling speedy responses with heavy consequences.
I understand that this may smack of perfect being the enemy of good, but this domain is akin to medical devices in terms of impact.
I think a discussion we're not having is how policing should exist moving forward given this technology exists for criminals as well.
We literally have people driving around with electromagnets on their license plates to cheat any number of perfectly reasonable traffic instruments. We have folks breaking into and going for joyrides in cars that lack engine immobilizers by exploiting them, then ditching them often after crashing.
I'm certainly fine with the folks who say we shouldn't have surveillance, but then how do we have law enforcement without hiring a literal army of police officers? We are effectively at the point where technology allows very small groups to massively exploit the general public.
In the vast majority of cases, we do not have the public funds to do law enforcement purely in person anymore. I suspect the alternative is not "greater liberty" but organized crime/vigilante justice.
2023 was a pretty miserable year in SF, in large part, because organized crime was using modern reselling platforms to create wildly productive fencing operations, driving extreme increases in car break-ins and burglaries.
This lead to a massive political shift towards stronger policing in the city, much of which has been facilitated by drone surveillance of groups engaging in burglaries without the dangers of high-speed car chases to the general public.
I do not think “just go back” is anything other than a nostalgia for a world we no longer live in.
> Garrett: At the highest level, nothing would make me happier than if we had state-by-state regulation on this type of technology. That to me is so crystal clear, because the lack of regulation on this type of technology just shows that our elected officials need to move faster than they have historically.
Agreed. We've had a lot of this - tech companies begging for tech regulation. Without the regulation it seems we'll always get these competitive races to the bottom of what's possible within the confines of the laws that do exist as less and less scrupulous companies enter the fray.
Companies are perfectly capable of being well-behaved without regulation. They simply choose not to. When I see these companies crying for regulation (even though I agree we need it desperately), it makes them look even more craven than they looked before.
This just reads to me like "won't someone please stop me from grinding up all these babies? If only someone would pass a law preventing me from doing these horrible things I keep doing..."
Like, you know you can just stop doing bad things, right? You shouldn't need a government telling you that maybe you shouldn't do bad things. Its as if he's saying he has no free will or executive action being the CEO of Flock, he has no way of having the company not be evil until the government gives him a rulebook.
This is in fact what is being said. Executives really don’t have free will. They are slaves to capital all the same. Every move is in light of furthering the interests of capital and not actual people or humanity. Hence no meaningful efforts on things like global emissions or wealth inequality. Capital’s incentives are in opposition to that.
This is pure bullshit, an accountability dodge. Executives don't have to accept the job. Executives don't have to stay in the job when they find out they have to compromise their ethics. These are not people who are forced to steal bread to eat, they're highly compensated elites who have been given everything by society and they choose to do evil in exchange for the high compensation.
Capital doesn't force management to do a single thing they don't wish in their hearts to do.
If they don’t, capital will put in an executive that will. You will notice profit has strong alignment. No one gives a shit about you or me or this green earth. All those execs give a shit about the next quarter.
I agree with you of course, people should be ethical. But if every human exists on a spectrum of evil <-> good, and we can't change this, then regulation/law serves a critical function. Proper legislation should at least create an effective floor for what's possible to profit off of. Otherwise we're pretty much at the mercy of the least scrupulous capitalist - and let me tell you, they will always exist.
For AI the argument is: if we regulate ownership back to the creators then China will eat our lunch. This is a morally bankrupt position pretty much by definition.
I agree, we do need regulations on this. We do need to also hold our elected representatives accountable. They're literally asleep (or in the alzheimer's ward) while on the job. And we also need to hold our police and other organizations who are actively abusing these tools that are already deployed. But we should also be holding the groups building these tools accountable for what their tools are doing, especially since its pretty obvious these kinds of abuses and failures would be extremely common.
The thing is, bank robbers and murders aren't the ones going on podcasts suggesting "gosh you know maybe I wouldn't be doing these things if there was some kind of regulation preventing me from robbing banks and stabbing people"
Its like a gun store owner acting all sad about how he sold a gun to an obviously deranged person who ended up murdering some people. You know you could have just not sold him the gun, right?
It's hard when people are paying for the cameras. This is capitalism. Money is always the #1 priority & we have little relative to those pushing for the surveillance state.
For Flock and similar cameras, it's often city councils without asking the public to vote on it first. I suppose the parking lot cameras are commercial, so customers would need to complain loudly enough or boycott businesses. However majority of customers might prefer having a sophisticated camera system making sure nobody breaks into their car while shopping. Those things seem to run after business hours, so presumably they're there to prevent anyone from using the parking lot who doesn't work or shop there.
More of the if you're living out of your car, we don't want to give you a place to park for the night because not having a home is a terrible sin in society. So is just hanging out I guess. The stores themselves should have adequate security already.
The swiftness with which this company went from "We are setting up cameras in neighborhoods where we were invited by HOA, representing the homeowners" to "We set up cameras on public highways all over the country putting everyone in a dragnet" is exactly why you don't let the camel's nose under the tent.
This shouldn't be a controversial opinion. The company exists to launder responsibility between government and corporation in order to facilitate mass surveillance. Another more accurate name for them could be "Constitutional Loophole Corp."
I haven't read the transcript yet but are there no "human in the middle" loops here?
Surely we could just get a pair of eyeballs on everything flagged and if it's not 100% crystal clear what's going on, then it gets flagged for a senior pair of eyes to look at?
I'm against the Minority Report kind of stuff but a system (AI Flock cameras in this case) flags up <thing>, surely it should then go into a queue for humans to look at! Flock can add in a certainty score and the human must verify!
The "human in the middle" is supposed to be the cops. However, what we've seen is what history tells us we can expect: the "human in the middle" will tend to just accept whatever the automation says and not give it a second thought.
This is why "human in the middle" doesn't provide much protection or solace.
The best read I can give it is that the police like slop just as much as anyone, and when the computer says "found it" they say "ok" and don't bother checking, especially if they're not the ones who have to stop the car themselves.
I know we're all sharpening pitchforks for Flock - but the national license plate database has been leading to mistakes like this for decades.
Some states also compound the problem by issuing a license plate number multiple times. So long before Flock getting someone else's speed camera tickets in the mail was already a problem.
> YCombinator and HN would run a "Slit your mommas throat as a service" if they though there were hockey stick growth profit.
While saying they're making the world a better place in the process. At least Wall Street sharks tend to be honest about their motivations and lack of giving a shit about you.
Yea and that’s effectively “did not do it” when it comes to anything involving consequences.
It was obvious what the rhetorical point `nekusar was making. I’ll give you the pedantic point of being technically correct when looking at it from a gods eye view.
But for the purposes of doing something in protest like destroying flock cameras, the person doesn't want to be known as not doing it. They want people to know they did it, and why they did it. They want the cred. So saying they didn't do it is not helping the cause. Accepting they did it while returning not guilty is the desired outcome. Having juries return not guilty verdicts when someone very clearly did something is a good step in having stupid laws overturned. Even if they don't get removed, it shows police and prosecutors that that juries are not going to convict for this type of case. You'd have to be a Jeanine Pirro type to be willing to bring cases that are known losers. Rational prosecutors will not.
I think as a citizen and a 2x juror, that it is our responsibility first to determine if a law should be a law for all. Secondly, if the law passes scrutiny, ONLY then should we determine guilt or innocence.
I am highly disincentivised in seeing victimless crimes as crimes. Like drug usage and all that. Or destruction of horrific security appratus like Flock.
Simply put, the laws wrong. And that means 'Not Guilty' for anyone I would have to judge, even if they admitted it in open court.
(I'm also aware that jury nullification has also been used to find black lynching perpetrators to be not guilty of the same nullification. I said that I judge a law if it should be. Murder is pretty clearly not victimless, but extenuating circumstances like self defense are a thing. Lynching is terrible, and so is freeing lynching perpe-traitors.)
You can agree that the person did the act yet still find them not guilty. The fact is still the fact. As someone else stated, not guilty does not mean they did not do it. It just means they do not want to say they are guilty. There's only two options. If if you do not choose "guilty" the only option remaining is "not guilty".
I'm in a hospital right now. I think that's part of the problem, used to my home wifi with dns block lists. I'll try to see if I can find ublock origin on mobile.
It was good but I feel like he missed the point somewhat. These tools are inaccurate, sure. But even if they weren’t we should still oppose this type of surveillance. Even if these cameras stopped all crime. He touched on more ideological grounds briefly but wish he spent more time there. There’s nothing in the Constitution that makes me think warrantless (mass) surveillance should be legal.
> That to me is so crystal clear, because the lack of regulation on this type of technology just shows that our elected officials need to move faster than they have historically.
Ah so the guy who’s responsible for giving access to whoever and refusing to take down cameras when city/state governments regulate them, is saying: it’s the fault that the states didn’t regulate the technology?
Fuck Flock and their fork tongued CEO. Regulations have been passed. People should be tearing these cameras down if Flock isn’t going to follow the law either.
I watched a series on Netflix recently: "Homicide Squad: New Orleans". The series was basically an infomercial for video surveillance cameras and license plate readers. It felt like all the detectives did was watch video and monitor LPR data all day. Every single homicide was solved like this - video surveillance and LPR data.
I'm not sure how accurate that show is, but the use of video surveillance and LPR data to solve crimes certainly seemed plausible. And it made me realize, unfortunately, these Flock cameras aren't going anywhere. People want crimes to get solved, especially homicides.
There's a lot going on in this story and interview, but I'd like to narrow in on one aspect I consider pretty core, and that I'm pretty disappointed Joel didn't push back on:
>Garrett:[...] To individuals that are promoting breaking the law, I just find that confusing. We’re a company that, by and large, by design from our founding, was that people shouldn’t break the law. I don’t know why that’s controversial, that I don’t agree with breaking the law. [...]
So do you hate gays Mr Garrett? Or "race mixing"? Because it wasn't that long ago that mixed-race sexual relations or homosexual relations were illegal in at least parts of the USA. See history about anti-miscegenation laws [0]. The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868, but it would be 99 YEARS before the SCOTUS would rule that such laws were unconstitutional. And it wouldn't be for another 36 years after that until a ruling (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003) that anti-sodomy laws [1] criminalizing "unnatural or immoral" sexual acts (and used heavily for discrimination and punishment of LGBT) were unconstitutional (and on grounds that, along with marriage equality, the current SCOTUS could certainly reverse).
Completely thoughtless appeals to "the law" demonstrate wild levels of ignorance and insular thinking, even ignoring the undoubted hypocrisy and bullshit given Flock's many little... incidents... just in the last few years (ex: "City Learns Flock Accessed Cameras in Children's Gymnastics Room as a Sales Demo" [2], "Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public" [3], "Flock and Cyble Inc. Weaponize "Cybercrime" Takedowns to Silence Critics" [4], "Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women" [5], etc etc etc). I suppose it's possible this guy is just incredibly bubbled vs also being a lying psychopath and/or being fully onboard with the boot stomping on prole faces forever, but it's awful either way.
"I don't fear surveillance because I don't break the law!" is the rallying cry of the current privileged class. Laws change.
This was such a weak interview, I recognize this is a car podcast and Joel's not an investigative journalist but the lack of pushback was so disappointing.
I find this quote interesting, "That lack of feeling safe starts to lead to these erosions of society."
These camera's don't make me feel safer given the rising fascism associated with surveillance. If they are taking it seriously, the false positives would also include the racism in policing and the inequality in criminal courts. However, they're not serious about it, and for them, this is just a public relations issue.
If America wasn't actively mobilizing their own gestapo (ICE) then my opinions would be more muted. I think that wealth inequality and oppression of a state's own citizens leads to the erosions of society. A modern interpretation of Benjamin Franklin's quote is apt, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Just a friendly reminder that Flock, a foreign and domestic enemy of the Constitution, i.e., the USA, aka, traitors, were incubated and funded by YCombinator and Andreessen Horowitz
I am absolutely biased, but there is a lot of attempt to shift or at least share the blame here and not a lot of accountability. Flock themselves mis-translated the plate, plain and simple, and should not be being used in production for alerting authorities on very serious matters.
We are already very aware that the police overreact and make plenty of mistakes. The obvious here being that even if this was the exact plate criminals can very easily, and do, swap plates - so you shouldn't just aggressively be knocking down vehicles because of the standard screwed in license plate that is displayed on the back. When was the last time you checked your license plate and made sure it was still yours? Would you even know it is yours? It has happened to me.
The way I see it their fundamental business model is not something we should tolerate. This is basically just stalking with a lot of money put behind it and barely any legal accountability. This is just not a thing we should tolerate in a free society.
In fact they seem to structure their business to specifically avoid accountability both for themselves and their customers.
In Pampano beach FL my 76 yo mother got pulled over for driving a stolen vehicle. Luckily the police had some common sense to decipher what happened. Plate swap, same make model and color.
I’m not a criminal*, but I hope when I’m 76 I’ll still be sufficiently lithe and compos mentis to pull off a career in crime, should I so choose.
* Though wouldn’t a criminal say that?
> We are already very aware that the police overreact and make plenty of mistakes
This is the deeper problem. See BLM, and then the backlash against that to create a much less accountable federal paramilitary/carabinieri force, ICE, resulting in the Minnesota conflict and several people getting killed.
And what lies underneath all that? Dirty Harry and a whole stack of subsequent propaganda. There's a very powerful story that the world is full of criminals and any form of police accountability (such as double checking information before acting, or taking a safety focused approach to stops which may include not doing them) is getting in the way of "fighting crime".
HN is firmly against Flock, but there are lots of people, Republicans and Democrats, who are going around demanding more surveillance to fight crime.
(The UK "ring of steel" and high presence of surveillance cameras and ANPR do not seem to have nearly this much level of problems. Here the controversy over stops is mostly good old manual racial discrimination for "driving while black")
The being tough on crime narrative ignores that police can act like criminals, have biases, enforce societal stereotypes and class systems, be incompetent or just make mistakes like any other human. Having a gun and a badge doesn't prevent any of that, thus the need for accountability. But voters also have to hold their representatives accountable for making sure police departments and justice systems do this.
> Flock themselves mis-translated the plate, plain and simple, and should not be being used in production for alerting authorities on very serious matters.
I am anti-Flock to the point that my friends and family roll their eyes when the topic comes up, but saying that because the image recognition software did not achieve 100% accuracy it can't be used under any circumstances is just silly.
I agree Flock shouldn't be used (I'd love to see the company bankrupt, the investors lose their money, and the founders imprisoned), but the accuracy of their software has nothing to do with why.
It wasn't accuracy, it was recognizing the type of plate. It was a weird plate.
here's the article with pictures:https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-trac...
Weird to us, but it's not as if it's not well known to (in this case) the state of NJ, nor is there an infinite set of license plate designs, particularly for the actual letter/number size, shape, and coloring.
"Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town"
That sure sounds like an accuracy issue to me!
> But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM.
The license plate is 34 DTM. How would this have turned out any differently if a cop had run the plate behind this car at a traffic light?
I wish Garrett had been asked about his attitude towards false positives and negatives. He's previously said that he feels false positives are a better option than negatives.
There are many challenging questions that should have been asked, and weren't.
> Flock themselves mis-translated the plate, plain and simple
To be fair to Flock, from what was said in this conversation they were told to be on the lookout of a partial plate of 34DTM. Meaning, there could be some additional characters that were not originally caught. So 34DTM10 and 1034DTM could potentially both be matches. It doesn't seem to me like Flock mistranslated the plate.
> The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.
No, it wasn't looking for partial matches, it was looking for an exact match of "34 DTM" and it missed the "10" in the middle of the victims plate because it was in non-standard small lettering (as required by law for those types of plates in their state).
This isn't in the featured article, thanks for sharing. I see its in one of the linked articles giving more backstory.
This is still an instance of a partial match. If it was looking for an exact match of 34 DTM, it wouldn't have found the target 34 03 DTM. So more like it was searching for /*34*DTM*/ instead of /*34DTM*/
There's a map of ALPRs based on OpenStreetMap so you can see ones near you:
https://maps.deflock.org/
There's a lot more than just Flock, Flock is just one of thousands of terrible companies creating mass spying on innocent people. And there's also other ALPR companies like Axon and Motorola.
Flock may be worse than those because of the AI features and large databases, but other companies making surveillance tech are not avoiding the AI features because of moral reasons.
There is a huge difference between the likes of Flock + Axon/Motorola currently. Flock is bad not because its surveillance its bad due to the scale, size and centralization.
And because of its surveillance and desire to turn the entire nation into a panopticon. Axon/Motorola is no better.
seems like:
- cop messed up, added an incomplete license plate number (34DTM) into the NCIC database.
- Flock cameras found his fancy car, a $155k Range Rover, which had a license plate like 34DTM10, and flagged it.
- cops didn't bother checking the police report before they went in and surrounded him.
thoughts:
- as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here. this was a scene straight of Brazil, and Flock was the typewriter. it was an accelerant, not the cause.
- police are shockingly incompetent. the individual officers, the departments, the bureaucratic systems, they're bad at their jobs. probably because they're insulated from consequences - these are people who can shoot the wrong person by accident, and at worst they get fired (QI.)
- none of this would have made the news if it wasn't a $155k Range Rover being driven by a reporter. how many people in beat-up Carollas have faced this same situation?
Flock's system misread the plate, simple as that. Trying to pitch it as solely human error just shows that they don't want to take responsibility of the limitations of their software. Handling partial matches should be the bare minimum. In this article the CEO talks like considering those is a great idea that they'll look into. That's so incredibly dumb that I can't believe that they don't already do that. What likely actually happened is that the plate was incorrectly flagged as a perfect match.
Why is their tech not tested on every plate format that is currently used? That should be table stakes. Why did it not flag the match for review because the "34" and "DTM" had an unusual amount of space between them (not matching expected spacing of NJ plates)? The truth is that they are probably just using some free ML models off of hugging face and selling it as a magic black box that finds criminals to police.
> as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here
Seeing this in an engineering-centric community disappoints me. It's hard to say for certain without seeing the system but I think it's extremely likely they are at fault. Things that come to mind:
- If the incomplete plate really was "34DTM" - why does the system allow that to be added? Either you should use actual wildcards to indicate you are searching for a partial or you should be blocked from adding an incomplete plate.
- This likely is not the first time his car was seen by the system. Why did they not require the person entering the partial match to clear / assess all of the cars that were known already?
- Alternatively, if it had never been seen before, why was that info not highlighted?
- If "flagging" the same for partial and full matches - that seems like a substantial design oversight.
There are so many things Flock could have done to prevent this kind of inevitable user error.
> as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here.
34DTM != 34DTM10
But 34DTM* == 34DTM10 which is exactly what Flock did.
> The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.
No, it wasn't looking for partial matches, it was looking for an exact match of "34 DTM" and it missed the "10" in the middle of the victims plate because it was in non-standard small lettering (as required by law for those types of plates in their state). To be clear, the 10 was in the middle of the victims plate number, which was "34 10 DTM", not the end of it.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-trac...
No license plate matching system required full, exact matches to return any hits. That has nothing to do with Flock.
The incident would not have happened without Flock misreading the small numbers in the middle of the plate as it tracked them around town.
You misunderstand Brazil--the system is the cause.
People can be relied upon to make mistakes. Any system that does not account for this fact and allows mistakes to "accelerate" is fundamentally flawed and requires redesign.
The system needs to account for how it will be used and resulting externalities. Being an accelerant can be a problem in and of itself. I do agree that having stricter societal and legal guardrails here is probably better then relying on companies to do the right thing, though.
Running a partial plate is common. Especially in a hit and run where a witness might only get a few digits.
Cops regularly made the exact same kind of mistake even when using their own eyeballs.
So we should give guns to children then because it’s just a tool to defend themselves right? Or a more common metaphor, if you give chimpanzee’s a gun…
The police have no actionable method of abuse if you take Flock cameras away. They wouldn’t be acting on flagged random license plates if you took away the dragnet and surveillance system that’s randomly flagging people.
This is 100% fault of Flock.
Flock can be a terrible unconstitutional company and this particular incident can have nothing to do with that and not be Flock's responsibility in any way. Acting like anyone who understands how true legacy ALPR systems work and how police officers track plates and search for stolen vehicles are by extension somehow supporting or excusing Flock is ridiculous.
Nearly the exact same thing could have happened with traditional non-surveillance ALPR systems, or with manual plate running by officers in cars.
Nope! Traditional ALPR systems follow the law and do not give out access like candy and do not automate flagging and tracking individuals. Traditional systems are not a dragnet.
This is 100% the fault of Flock.
> But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM.
The license plate is 34 DTM. There is nothing about Flock that caused this to happen - had any officer run this plate while sitting behind the car in traffic, exactly the same thing would have happened.
In America we do give guns to children. And it wasn't until the 1990s for it to become illegal to bring a gun to school.
Is there any evidence or other form of justification for the Flock CEO's claims about how it is responsible for SF's crime downturn? I find it hard to believe that Flock cameras are at the heart of such a wide-ranging effect. I am not a local, and I have only done a cursory search, but I don't see the elected officials making the same claim -- I have seen them say it has more to do with changing socioeconomic factors.
"Inevitably what happens is, let’s take the rental car example: A car is reported stolen by the rental car agency."
I've heard stories of rental car companies being very aggressive in reporting a car stolen. It sounds like Flock is having to do a lot of work to handle reports made by rental car companies specifically. This leaves me wondering how aggressive rental companies are in reporting back to the department they made the stolen report notifying the car had been found. I'm guessing not very.
These rental companies need to be held responsible for their lackadaisical use of stolen car reports. It is not the police's responsibility for what is essentially a contract dispute. If I allow someone to borrow my car, the police will not consider this a stolen car situation even if they said they would bring it back the next day. This is no different than a car not being returned to the rental company, so why are the police willing to be involved?
Hertz had a "glitch" in their system which would wrongly flag cars as stolen and automatically report that to police.
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusa...
If Flock has so many issues with this database, and all their solutions are patchwork, and those solutions remain local to the jurisdiction that is locally using Flock, then this is a bad product.
If you build a product on a bad database, you cannot load the blame for the resulting bad product on the bad database. If it was not fit for purpose, then the product designers are the problem as much as anything else.
This applies doubly for a product that relies so heavily on automation enabling speedy responses with heavy consequences.
I understand that this may smack of perfect being the enemy of good, but this domain is akin to medical devices in terms of impact.
I think a discussion we're not having is how policing should exist moving forward given this technology exists for criminals as well.
We literally have people driving around with electromagnets on their license plates to cheat any number of perfectly reasonable traffic instruments. We have folks breaking into and going for joyrides in cars that lack engine immobilizers by exploiting them, then ditching them often after crashing.
I'm certainly fine with the folks who say we shouldn't have surveillance, but then how do we have law enforcement without hiring a literal army of police officers? We are effectively at the point where technology allows very small groups to massively exploit the general public.
In the vast majority of cases, we do not have the public funds to do law enforcement purely in person anymore. I suspect the alternative is not "greater liberty" but organized crime/vigilante justice.
> how do we have law enforcement without hiring a literal army of police officers?
Just like we did way back in 2023 before the massive nationwide rollout of Flock cameras.
A surveillance state is the antithesis of what the U.S. founders gave us. It is fundamentally illiberal.
2023 was a pretty miserable year in SF, in large part, because organized crime was using modern reselling platforms to create wildly productive fencing operations, driving extreme increases in car break-ins and burglaries.
This lead to a massive political shift towards stronger policing in the city, much of which has been facilitated by drone surveillance of groups engaging in burglaries without the dangers of high-speed car chases to the general public.
I do not think “just go back” is anything other than a nostalgia for a world we no longer live in.
> Garrett: At the highest level, nothing would make me happier than if we had state-by-state regulation on this type of technology. That to me is so crystal clear, because the lack of regulation on this type of technology just shows that our elected officials need to move faster than they have historically.
Agreed. We've had a lot of this - tech companies begging for tech regulation. Without the regulation it seems we'll always get these competitive races to the bottom of what's possible within the confines of the laws that do exist as less and less scrupulous companies enter the fray.
> tech companies begging for tech regulation
Companies are perfectly capable of being well-behaved without regulation. They simply choose not to. When I see these companies crying for regulation (even though I agree we need it desperately), it makes them look even more craven than they looked before.
please google "regulatory capture"
This just reads to me like "won't someone please stop me from grinding up all these babies? If only someone would pass a law preventing me from doing these horrible things I keep doing..."
Like, you know you can just stop doing bad things, right? You shouldn't need a government telling you that maybe you shouldn't do bad things. Its as if he's saying he has no free will or executive action being the CEO of Flock, he has no way of having the company not be evil until the government gives him a rulebook.
This is in fact what is being said. Executives really don’t have free will. They are slaves to capital all the same. Every move is in light of furthering the interests of capital and not actual people or humanity. Hence no meaningful efforts on things like global emissions or wealth inequality. Capital’s incentives are in opposition to that.
> Executives really don’t have free will.
This is pure bullshit, an accountability dodge. Executives don't have to accept the job. Executives don't have to stay in the job when they find out they have to compromise their ethics. These are not people who are forced to steal bread to eat, they're highly compensated elites who have been given everything by society and they choose to do evil in exchange for the high compensation.
Capital doesn't force management to do a single thing they don't wish in their hearts to do.
If they don’t, capital will put in an executive that will. You will notice profit has strong alignment. No one gives a shit about you or me or this green earth. All those execs give a shit about the next quarter.
I agree with you of course, people should be ethical. But if every human exists on a spectrum of evil <-> good, and we can't change this, then regulation/law serves a critical function. Proper legislation should at least create an effective floor for what's possible to profit off of. Otherwise we're pretty much at the mercy of the least scrupulous capitalist - and let me tell you, they will always exist.
For AI the argument is: if we regulate ownership back to the creators then China will eat our lunch. This is a morally bankrupt position pretty much by definition.
I agree, we do need regulations on this. We do need to also hold our elected representatives accountable. They're literally asleep (or in the alzheimer's ward) while on the job. And we also need to hold our police and other organizations who are actively abusing these tools that are already deployed. But we should also be holding the groups building these tools accountable for what their tools are doing, especially since its pretty obvious these kinds of abuses and failures would be extremely common.
The thing is, bank robbers and murders aren't the ones going on podcasts suggesting "gosh you know maybe I wouldn't be doing these things if there was some kind of regulation preventing me from robbing banks and stabbing people"
Its like a gun store owner acting all sad about how he sold a gun to an obviously deranged person who ended up murdering some people. You know you could have just not sold him the gun, right?
> They're literally asleep (or in the alzheimer's ward) while on the job
No. They're being bought off.
That too, I agree!
I'm just also pointing out situations like Kay Granger.
It's hard when people are paying for the cameras. This is capitalism. Money is always the #1 priority & we have little relative to those pushing for the surveillance state.
For Flock and similar cameras, it's often city councils without asking the public to vote on it first. I suppose the parking lot cameras are commercial, so customers would need to complain loudly enough or boycott businesses. However majority of customers might prefer having a sophisticated camera system making sure nobody breaks into their car while shopping. Those things seem to run after business hours, so presumably they're there to prevent anyone from using the parking lot who doesn't work or shop there.
More of the if you're living out of your car, we don't want to give you a place to park for the night because not having a home is a terrible sin in society. So is just hanging out I guess. The stores themselves should have adequate security already.
This is such an evil company; they should be regulated out of existence.
The swiftness with which this company went from "We are setting up cameras in neighborhoods where we were invited by HOA, representing the homeowners" to "We set up cameras on public highways all over the country putting everyone in a dragnet" is exactly why you don't let the camel's nose under the tent.
This shouldn't be a controversial opinion. The company exists to launder responsibility between government and corporation in order to facilitate mass surveillance. Another more accurate name for them could be "Constitutional Loophole Corp."
Yes they should be shut down and their assets destroyed and their CEO should be publicly humiliated as he’s done to many many other people.
I haven't read the transcript yet but are there no "human in the middle" loops here?
Surely we could just get a pair of eyeballs on everything flagged and if it's not 100% crystal clear what's going on, then it gets flagged for a senior pair of eyes to look at?
I'm against the Minority Report kind of stuff but a system (AI Flock cameras in this case) flags up <thing>, surely it should then go into a queue for humans to look at! Flock can add in a certainty score and the human must verify!
It could still increase efficiency this way.
The "human in the middle" is supposed to be the cops. However, what we've seen is what history tells us we can expect: the "human in the middle" will tend to just accept whatever the automation says and not give it a second thought.
This is why "human in the middle" doesn't provide much protection or solace.
The best read I can give it is that the police like slop just as much as anyone, and when the computer says "found it" they say "ok" and don't bother checking, especially if they're not the ones who have to stop the car themselves.
I know we're all sharpening pitchforks for Flock - but the national license plate database has been leading to mistakes like this for decades.
Some states also compound the problem by issuing a license plate number multiple times. So long before Flock getting someone else's speed camera tickets in the mail was already a problem.
A mistake like this wouldn't be so bad if we didn't have flock cameras everywher.
Yes, building a highly reactive automated system upon flawed foundations is bad.
Flock (YC S17)
Ugh. It hurts my brain to think about the Venn diagram of privacy advocates and YC sycophants that hang out on Hacker News.
Money is a nice balm for cognitive dissonance.
Human rights are really important to us!*
*As long as it doesn't prevent us from getting rich.
YCombinator and HN would run a "Slit your mommas throat as a service" if they though there were hockey stick growth profit.
Flock, and anybody who funds them are the real domestic terrorists. Anybody who destroys these devices are patriots in my book.
And if I ever serve for jury duty over a case like that, they didn't do it.
> YCombinator and HN would run a "Slit your mommas throat as a service" if they though there were hockey stick growth profit.
While saying they're making the world a better place in the process. At least Wall Street sharks tend to be honest about their motivations and lack of giving a shit about you.
> And if I ever serve for jury duty over a case like that, they didn't do it.
Now you're bending facts. You can decide they are not guilty of a crime, but you can't make them have not done it.
He’s referencing jury nullification.
Juries actually can “make them have not done it”, although that’s been used for good and ill purposes.
"Not guilty" does not mean "did not do it" - it means "the state didn't prove that they did it beyond a reasonable doubt."
Yea and that’s effectively “did not do it” when it comes to anything involving consequences.
It was obvious what the rhetorical point `nekusar was making. I’ll give you the pedantic point of being technically correct when looking at it from a gods eye view.
But for the purposes of doing something in protest like destroying flock cameras, the person doesn't want to be known as not doing it. They want people to know they did it, and why they did it. They want the cred. So saying they didn't do it is not helping the cause. Accepting they did it while returning not guilty is the desired outcome. Having juries return not guilty verdicts when someone very clearly did something is a good step in having stupid laws overturned. Even if they don't get removed, it shows police and prosecutors that that juries are not going to convict for this type of case. You'd have to be a Jeanine Pirro type to be willing to bring cases that are known losers. Rational prosecutors will not.
Exactly.
I think as a citizen and a 2x juror, that it is our responsibility first to determine if a law should be a law for all. Secondly, if the law passes scrutiny, ONLY then should we determine guilt or innocence.
I am highly disincentivised in seeing victimless crimes as crimes. Like drug usage and all that. Or destruction of horrific security appratus like Flock.
Simply put, the laws wrong. And that means 'Not Guilty' for anyone I would have to judge, even if they admitted it in open court.
(I'm also aware that jury nullification has also been used to find black lynching perpetrators to be not guilty of the same nullification. I said that I judge a law if it should be. Murder is pretty clearly not victimless, but extenuating circumstances like self defense are a thing. Lynching is terrible, and so is freeing lynching perpe-traitors.)
If you really want to nitpick, juries are what settle questions of facts.
You can agree that the person did the act yet still find them not guilty. The fact is still the fact. As someone else stated, not guilty does not mean they did not do it. It just means they do not want to say they are guilty. There's only two options. If if you do not choose "guilty" the only option remaining is "not guilty".
not a good look for YC
It’s time for a refilm of the Paul Newman movie Cool Hand Luke but in this version he is cutting off the poles that support the fluke cameras.
I can't deal with the ads on this page on mobile
use firefox and ublock origin. Use dns with ad blocking. You shouldn't see ads on mobile.
I'm in a hospital right now. I think that's part of the problem, used to my home wifi with dns block lists. I'll try to see if I can find ublock origin on mobile.
Also, Brave Mobile, by default, seems to block most ads.
What a coincidence, John Oliver just talked about this company [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnBPhelCdWE
Benn Jordan has released a number of them as well showing how insecure they are among other things. [1]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/@BennJordan/search?query=flock
It was good but I feel like he missed the point somewhat. These tools are inaccurate, sure. But even if they weren’t we should still oppose this type of surveillance. Even if these cameras stopped all crime. He touched on more ideological grounds briefly but wish he spent more time there. There’s nothing in the Constitution that makes me think warrantless (mass) surveillance should be legal.
> That to me is so crystal clear, because the lack of regulation on this type of technology just shows that our elected officials need to move faster than they have historically.
Ah so the guy who’s responsible for giving access to whoever and refusing to take down cameras when city/state governments regulate them, is saying: it’s the fault that the states didn’t regulate the technology?
Fuck Flock and their fork tongued CEO. Regulations have been passed. People should be tearing these cameras down if Flock isn’t going to follow the law either.
I watched a series on Netflix recently: "Homicide Squad: New Orleans". The series was basically an infomercial for video surveillance cameras and license plate readers. It felt like all the detectives did was watch video and monitor LPR data all day. Every single homicide was solved like this - video surveillance and LPR data.
I'm not sure how accurate that show is, but the use of video surveillance and LPR data to solve crimes certainly seemed plausible. And it made me realize, unfortunately, these Flock cameras aren't going anywhere. People want crimes to get solved, especially homicides.
https://www.netflix.com/title/82158926
Garrett Langley should be arrested for making false reports to law enforcement authorities. It's a felony.
Flock executives should be under constant 24/7 surveillance to prevent corporate crime.
Who watches the watchers?
The people who let them get away with everything because they’re traitors
There's a lot going on in this story and interview, but I'd like to narrow in on one aspect I consider pretty core, and that I'm pretty disappointed Joel didn't push back on:
>Garrett:[...] To individuals that are promoting breaking the law, I just find that confusing. We’re a company that, by and large, by design from our founding, was that people shouldn’t break the law. I don’t know why that’s controversial, that I don’t agree with breaking the law. [...]
So do you hate gays Mr Garrett? Or "race mixing"? Because it wasn't that long ago that mixed-race sexual relations or homosexual relations were illegal in at least parts of the USA. See history about anti-miscegenation laws [0]. The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868, but it would be 99 YEARS before the SCOTUS would rule that such laws were unconstitutional. And it wouldn't be for another 36 years after that until a ruling (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003) that anti-sodomy laws [1] criminalizing "unnatural or immoral" sexual acts (and used heavily for discrimination and punishment of LGBT) were unconstitutional (and on grounds that, along with marriage equality, the current SCOTUS could certainly reverse).
Completely thoughtless appeals to "the law" demonstrate wild levels of ignorance and insular thinking, even ignoring the undoubted hypocrisy and bullshit given Flock's many little... incidents... just in the last few years (ex: "City Learns Flock Accessed Cameras in Children's Gymnastics Room as a Sales Demo" [2], "Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public" [3], "Flock and Cyble Inc. Weaponize "Cybercrime" Takedowns to Silence Critics" [4], "Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women" [5], etc etc etc). I suppose it's possible this guy is just incredibly bubbled vs also being a lying psychopath and/or being fully onboard with the boot stomping on prole faces forever, but it's awful either way.
----
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation_laws_in_the...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodomy_laws_in_the_United_Stat...
2: https://www.404media.co/city-learns-flock-accessed-cameras-i...
3: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/tracking-alpr-c...
4: https://footnote4a.org/news/cyble-downtime
5: https://ipvm.com/reports/police-chiefs-track
"I don't fear surveillance because I don't break the law!" is the rallying cry of the current privileged class. Laws change.
This was such a weak interview, I recognize this is a car podcast and Joel's not an investigative journalist but the lack of pushback was so disappointing.
I find this quote interesting, "That lack of feeling safe starts to lead to these erosions of society."
These camera's don't make me feel safer given the rising fascism associated with surveillance. If they are taking it seriously, the false positives would also include the racism in policing and the inequality in criminal courts. However, they're not serious about it, and for them, this is just a public relations issue.
If America wasn't actively mobilizing their own gestapo (ICE) then my opinions would be more muted. I think that wealth inequality and oppression of a state's own citizens leads to the erosions of society. A modern interpretation of Benjamin Franklin's quote is apt, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
I fee watched all the time now. Part of me wonders what sort of legal behavior gets one noticed.
Just a friendly reminder that Flock, a foreign and domestic enemy of the Constitution, i.e., the USA, aka, traitors, were incubated and funded by YCombinator and Andreessen Horowitz
[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
[2] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-secures-major-...